The Only Time To Love Is Now

Anger sprouts from fear.

Fear becomes intense physical responses. Fear is a natural response life uses it to survive. Mammals and even plants contract into tighter beings when we are afraid. With this tension we protect ourselves from perceived harm by escape or attack.

Many people are chronically fearful and don’t know they are thinking fearful thoughts. Their fear thinking is habit rather than response. Feeling fear when life is threatens is normal. Habitual fear (chronic anxiety) is uncomfortable. Being ‘on edge’ is not pleasant. This anxiety is guidance to change our thinking change our feeling to more realistic calmness. Reflecting on our habitual fearful emotions is a practice to transforming those emotions.

Many fearful thought-habits are trauma based. Because trauma is emotionally overwhelming by definition, learning to heal from trauma requires work. Nature’s wisdom has designed us to perceive and record life threats, traumas. Changing trauma memories requires stopping to notice their presence. We are free to resume focusing our awareness beyond the feeling of threat, into this moment of safety and freedom. This refocusing is what we call meditation.

By the time our son was nine, I’d begun meditating to resolve my anxiety. I realized there was lots of room for me to be kinder, gentler, with my thoughts and feelings.

Like most American males I grew up steeped in a culture ripe with disdain for vulnerability. Don’t be a sissy had established itself in my inner voice, and I worked hard to be tough and masculine, not wimpy like a girl.

Feeling the threat of exclusion was literally life threatening. The basic protection of the tribe is embedded in our genes and behaviors, and I learned early to intensify my energy into physical, emotional and mental pressure that was seen as attractive and superior.

Thirty years later as a father I carried this entrained, conditioned tension into shaping my children’s behavior. If they didn’t do what they were told they faced the menace of intense emotional rejection. Loud voice, menacing postures, threat of physical, emotional and mental rejection had become the bottom line.

All three of our children became predictably good kids. Anxious kids. Driven like their dad to be intense and dominant to make their bodies perform socially, academically, athletically. They were also learning to be themselves which led to this life lesson for me. On the day our son spoke kindness and gentleness for himself, he’d had it up to here with my angry, dominant responses. He didn’t know it, but by speaking for himself, he was speaking for me as well. He also spoke to the fearful male culture.

After so many of my emotionally angry overspills, I had come to understand there was a distance growing between me and the children. In my meditations on my behavior, I saw they were protecting themselves from me by distancing themselves. I sensed this was more than normal developmental independence.

They had become afraid of my anger. They had learned to become afraid when I was afraid. As I recognized this behavior in me and growing in them, I took up apologizing for my blowups. At least I could show up after my blow ups to clean up the mess.

Back to our nine year old son, whose clear blue eyes were filled with tears listening to my hundredth apology. With a self-awareness which I am still learning, he looked straight at me and said, “I don’t want you to apologize, I want you to stop doing it.”

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This post was previously published on THEFATHERCONNECTION.WORDPRESS.COM.

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